Hi again it's Jason from Fraser Valley Rose Farm and today I want to talk to you about why potting
soil like this is far superior to natural soil and in case you think that's a controversial statement
i have to assure you that as a commercial grower both here on my farm growing roses and for another
wholesaler that i work for there is no comparison potting soil is just the way to go when producing
and propagating young plants now there is another side to this story i'm just not going to tell it
to you i'm going to leave that to somebody else Ashley from the Gardening in Canada Channel has
agreed to make a companion video to this where she's going to talk about the benefits of natural
soil versus potting soil so if you want to hear that side of the story i'm going to leave that
linked below the video before i continue on let's talk about what is potting soil now potting soil
is an artificial mix it's made up of a bunch of ingredients i'll go over those in just a second
but it's intended to create a replacement for the function of garden soil when you're growing
containers or as young plants in propagation the idea of potting soil is that it's lighter
it has good moisture retention capacity it has good drainage it has good air holding capacity
and it's typically free of things like weed and plant pathogens so that's the whole purpose of
potting soil to make a good mix without some of the disadvantages of natural soil
now things that they typically will put into it you'll see wood products things like composted
wood or shredded wood or composted bark mulch you'll see things like peat moss coconut fiber
other components will include things like vermiculite or perlite or pumice sometimes
sand if they want to be a little bit heavier so those are the typical components and that's the
reason why they put it together i did outline some of the advantages there but weight is a big one
how heavy is the soil that you're putting into your pot i just dug out of this out of my garden
i have a fairly heavy clayish soil in my yard here and boy is my arm getting tired even holding on to
it when you're producing plants in containers in a gallon of of a container a typical potting soil
may be something less than a pound natural soil can be up to 10 or 12 pounds for the same volume
of soil so it's just a beast to handle and imagine if you're dealing with a much larger container
something like this guy beside me here that's just a hundreds of pounds of difference between potting
soil and natural soil another big advantage of potting soil is that it is mixed and actually
engineered to have great qualities in terms of moisture retention air holding capacity
and drainage and you can actually have it custom made for the crops that you're growing if you're
growing a shrub like this then you'll probably want to go with something that is a little more
free draining and if you're going for young plants or seedlings you might choose something that's a
little bit finer so their roots can reach through it a little bit easier that's not flexibility that
you can have when you're dealing with natural soil two more qualities of potting soil that are
engineered and so controlled right out of the gate ph and fertilizer and these two are relatively
intertwined because the ph value of your soil medium or your soilless medium in this case
is going to affect the availability of your nutrients and naturally most producers of potting
soil place their ph just slightly on the acidic side but close to neutral so it's kind of in that
optimum range for for nutrient availability and of course out of the box they don't come with a whole
ton of nutrients in them they usually either put in a very small amount so basically that leaves
you with the greatest level of flexibility of adding the nutrients that are appropriate to
the crop without dealing with what's in that soil and what's being released naturally those things
i've discussed so far the structural qualities of potting soil those are great but they're not the
main event the main event when it comes to potting soil is its relative freedom from weed seeds and
plant pathogens and this is the killer app this is what convinced everybody in the industry that
it was a good idea to switch over to artificial potting soil so this is within the living memory
of the industry within the last 100 years or so it was a very common practice to be mixing in regular
natural soil into your propagation soil into your potting soil as you planted up containers with
young plants in them and what they were finding was there was a prevalence of root borne pathogens
things that were coming from the soil that were getting into young plants into young seedlings
and young cuttings when they were at the most vulnerable and it would just take over and wipe
out sporadically all these different crops and once they switched over to a fully artificial
kind of potting soil those things became far less frequent and much easier to contain and control so
that was the big one and i know that some people are going to take me to task for using the term
sterile like you know you hear that term used a lot with potting soil and in truth it's not
proper it's nothing nothing out there is sterile we're not dealing with an operating room here
but it i'm going to call it relatively sterile which i know is bad too but think of these two
things if you took a cutting board that you took out of the dishwasher put it on the counter and
another cutting board that you'd use to slice your your raw chicken the night before and
you took those and you served platters of chopped vegetables on those which one would you feel safer
eating off of well clearly the one that came out of the dishwasher not sterile no but certainly not
uh easily known to be contaminated with something that can be dangerous to you the same way that the
bacteria that's dangerous coming from raw chicken is dangerous to your body that's the same way
that the existing life that's sitting that's teeming inside of natural soil is dangerous
to young plants plants that don't have a lot of a lot of defenses yet they're just you know little
seedlings little cuttings and they're gonna struggle to fight off anything that's coming
uh from the from the soil so where should you be using potting soil well certainly in something
like a plug tray in propagation certainly small containers that come out of propagation larger
plant containers or plant pots you know one gallon two gallon three gallon five gallon
any kind of the the portable sizes of plants those are a good place to consider using potting soil
even large containers for your patio and deck or around the yard
in larger sizes would be appropriate to consider potting soil it's really when you get into very
large areas like a large raised bed or you get into the garden itself that you the my argument
starts to fall apart and this is where uh the advantages of natural soil start to take over and
i'll leave that part to ashley in the companion video that she's producing for her channel that's
the gardening in canada channel which i will link below alright thanks so much for listening
to my thoughts today on why potting soil is better and tune in to Ashley's channel for the response